Dr. King, John Brown, and the moral formation of white people
Breaking through the silences
“Whites, it must be frankly said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance.”
—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?1
Evoydeene Bailey (Ebbie to her friends and family) was in the inner circle of First Baptist Church from the time she was a young adult. At 98 years old now, she holds a lot of institutional memory. Unlike many 98 year olds, her memory is quite sharp. She recalls people and events in much the same way that the archives narrate them. She knows names and places and events with clarity.
On top of her clear memory, Mrs. Bailey is an energetic conversationalist. The fall afternoon I spent with her in 2021 was my favorite interviews over the course of years of research. It seemed that one of the gifts of being “full of years” was total honesty. In your mid-90s, there’s nothing left to hide.
Our conversations were more frank, and became so more quickly, than did my interviews with anyone else.
Bailey was there, in the middle of the decision making, when First Baptist Church Charlotte made their opportunistic move into Charlotte’s Brooklyn neighborhood as part of the Urban Renewal project there that displaced more than 1,000 Black families, destroyed more than 200 Black businesses, and destroyed at least twelve Black churches. All that destruction created even more accumulated advantage for First Baptist Church.2
In a more overtly patriarchal time, it was mostly the men of the church, including her husband Allen, whose names were recorded as the decision makers.3 Years later, Bailey was still tempted to see their decisions as providential. But she had also begun to see them as more complicated than she had once thought. She was clear that in their move, and in their public voice within the city, the people at FBC had made some serious errors along the way. Compounding their trespasses, they stayed silent about their opportunism—and their support for the destruction of other people’s churches—for many years. “There’s hardly anyone there that even knows what happened,” she said. “We’ve kept on doing our same thing.”
Mrs. Bailey described for me some of the compassionate work she and the people at FBC had done in the 1960s for some of the poorest white residents of Charlotte. She remembered one scene in particular with a family whose material struggles persisted for years. The visual symbol she associated with them was a clothesline. In kindness and care, FBC members offered various forms of assistance and charity for a struggling family in a struggling neighborhood. She identified their house when she went to visit by the clothesline in the front yard.
Clotheslines abounded in Brooklyn, but the people of First Baptist never extended them the same kindness, either in the form of charity or advocacy for justice. Bailey was clear what that meant, morally speaking: “We failed. We lived in our own little world.”
Ebbie Bailey had not thought much about it before, but it was easy for her to see that things could have been different: “Now I’m wondering, when I hosted groups [of FBC members] in my house, why didn’t I do right? I didn’t because nobody else did.”
“Why wasn’t I a breakthrough?”
“Mae Hope didn’t. If she had, I would have followed [her]. Or Terri Smith. Or Jenna Poe.”4
I asked her to repeat her statement. “You would have followed them and they would have followed you?”
She replied, “Yeah. I think they would have. We gave each others’ kids parties when they got married. We did that.”
“But we didn’t know about the thing that needed to be done worst of all. We just didn’t.”5
There was time for showers and teas and dainty little fetes.
There was time to make little white bread sandwiches with the brown crusts cut off.
But no time for justice. “The thing that needed to be done worst of all.”
It’s a curious question: what is the most important thing to do in the face of horrifying injustice? In the case of Urban Renewal, surely the answer was to stop the bulldozers. That is the first thing. But beyond that there are many things to be done to eliminate the bulldozing at the source.
I’ve thought again about my conversation with Ebbie Bailey as I’ve listened to the new podcast American Carnage from the writer Jeff Stein. The podcast is about John Brown, the American abolitionist who attempted to start a rebellion against slavery in Harper’s Ferry, VA (now in West Virginia) in October 1859. I’ve found the podcast gripping and fascinating.
Brown’s legacy is often confined to a handful of sentences in history textbooks. Those textbooks, and the public memory at large, generally show the normal American deference to slaveholders and their violence, while sharply critiquing violence done by those aiming to stop the abuse and cruelty. In the normal telling, John Brown is a terrorist who should have waited for democratic processes to inevitably bring about an end to the historical oddity of slavery. Rarely mentioned is that the system of slavery consisted of millions of legalized acts of rape, abuse, torture, and murder. Brown’s insurrectionists are routinely condemned; various enslavers, including multiple presidents, are American heroes; the system of slavery, over the course of 250 years, was but a momentary diversion on the way to a more perfect union.
The podcast has challenged me to consider Brown’s legacy more carefully. And, it has shown me how little I knew, and how little most Americans know, about Brown.
A few of the tidbits from the first podcast episode that grabbed my attention were:
The Brown family was excommunicated from their church for insisting that the congregation fully integrate Black people.
Brown once stood up in a church meeting, raised his right hand, and “forever consecrated his life to the destruction of slavery.”
Brown later gathered his wife and children around the fireplace at their home and insisted that they make a similar pledge.
Brown and his family moved to the Catskill Mountains in NY to be part of an integrated farming community. Such communities were at odds even with white abolitionist movements, who often opposed slavery but did not support integration. The Browns, though, were full integrationists.
The little anecdotes above had me returning to one of the framing questions of the podcast. Among Stein’s organizing questions for the five-part series is (in my words) “what makes possible the kind of white man who will sacrifice his life to end slavery?” I’m not going to defend John Brown’s actions at every point, but there’s little question that his fanatic devotion to the cause helped to destabilize and eventually end the system of slavery.
I might transpose Stein’s question to something like this: what kind of moral formation will create white people who are determined to end white supremacy? Who aren’t satisfied with well-heeled wedding showers or country club anniversary parties? Or, who are fed up with being robbed by white bosses in exchange for the supposed psychic benefits of whiteness? Or who just want to keep it moving, never stirring up any trouble?
In Ebbie Bailey’s words, what does it take for us to break through? How do we form ourselves to do right?
The challenge before us is not only to stop the bulldozers. It is to become the kind of people, and to raise the kind of children, who will know that the bulldozers are running, and who wouldn’t have gotten on them in the first place.
Another endorsement for Our Trespasses: I’ve read the work of Ched Myers for 25 years now. Over the last several years, he has been a mentor to me. He’s also been a surfing coach for my two sons! The work that developed into Our Trespasses started in earnest with a writing workshop led by Ched, Elaine Enns, and Rose Marie Berger more than five years ago. Here’s what Ched has to say about the book:
“In 1963 Dr. King wrote that it was “necessary to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease” of racism. Greg Jarrell’s brilliant study does just that, demonstrating the revelatory power of re-reading the past and present of one’s place through lenses of haunted land, race and class genealogies, and traditions of resilience. Having apprenticed for two decades to one Charlotte neighborhood, Jarrell exhumes stories of struggle against structural racism and poverty entombed beneath parking lots and sanctuaries. He follows white and black families (and churches) “like ghosts” through epochs of betrayal: from Reconstruction to “Urban Renewal” to contemporary gentrification.
The narrative particularities of this book are deeply engaging, laced with (literally) penetrating and achingly honesty vignettes of place, people, and spirits. Yet the strategies of development displacement and disparity it traces were reproduced in every major American city over the last century, including where I grew up a continent away. I cannot commend more highly the challenging sociological and biblical reflections herein, which take urban theology deeper and offer a personal and political map for how white churches might yet turn to a vocation of penance and restorative justice.”
Bonus: here are the boys with their surfing coach, from an amazing visit with Ched and Elaine at their home near Ventura, CA during Thanksgiving 2022.
About pre-ordering books: You’ve likely heard different authors ask you to pre-order books. When you pre-order, you help publishers and booksellers get a glimpse of the interest in a book. They pay close attention to sales figures, which helps them figure out how to use their resources in stocking or promoting books or scheduling events. Authors benefit from this: just a few days ago, a bookstore emailed me - without me asking - about doing an event in their store because the book has accumulated a nice batch of pre-orders there.
When you pre-order we all benefit: authors, publishers, bookstores, the reading public. My book drops February 20, so now is the time to get those orders in to your favorite local bookseller. And perhaps you can nudge them that you think I would make a fascinating guest!
One more note: This week marks the 100th birthday of Max Roach, NC native, the architect of bebop drumming, fierce advocate for justice. Here’s one of his most important works:
The book is easy to find as a standalone volume. I am citing from King, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986) 561.
I’m using the phrase “accumulated advantage” by the influence of philosopher Olufemi Taiwo. He suggests this better describes the phenomenon we usually mean with the term “privilege” or “racial privilege” or “white privilege.” See Taiwo, Reconsidering Reparations. (New York: Oxford UP).
That time has not yet passed in the Southern Baptist Convention, of which FBC Charlotte is a part.
Bailey is referring, in Mae Hope, Jenna Poe, and Terri Smith, to the other three families who formed the nexus of decision making and power within FBC from the 1960s through the 1990s. The patriarchs of those families were called “The Four Horsemen” by others in the congregation, and not always affectionately.
All quotes I’ve taken directly from my interview with Ebbie Bailey, October 8, 2021. There are several moments in the recording of our conversation where her voice is a bit garbled. At 96 years old, her speech was not always clear. In those instances, I’ve done my best to capture what she said, and the spirit in which she said it.
Thanks as always. My high school football coach was a pious Baptist deacon, member of my church. He forbade cussing by his assistant coaches or members of the team. Instead, when our poor play rankled him, he would shout "JOHN BROWN, boy! Get your head on straight." It wasn't until decades later than I realized it was a racially-tinged statement.